Conversation
Notices
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Unpopular opinion: Completely free speech is not the response to censorship. It is the other end of the extreme spectrum.
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Ideas without merit that have no backing should not be given the same time of day as those which have proven to be useful and reliable.
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@maiyannah IMO the solution is not messing with it on an institutional level. That way it'll control itself and ridiculous baseless ideas will fall out because they can't support themselves.
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@nerthos The urge to meddle, to strike down bad ideas, as an underlying pathology to most censorship campaigns. Not all censorship is done on government remit. A startling amount of it is done under the banner of free speech, using what can only be called bullying to silence those they dislike.
I don't really have an easy answer to this, since there's no easy way in practice to ensure that the ideas with actual backing and evidence are the ones that succeed, but I can definitely say government meddling only exacerbates the problem. -
@maiyannah I didn't mean only governments, that's why I said institutional. By institution I mean governments, universities, schools, and all kinds of organizations that have any say over idea validation.
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@nerthos This is what the mechanism of peer review is supposed to mitigate, but this is another area ideologues have edged out the professionals.
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@maiyannah honestly the only way to prevent this is pushing out the ideologues from the beginning, before they can get a foothold. Then again that doesn't always work anyway, see modern art. Actual art academies told them "you guys are not skilled enough" and they basically destroyed art with a spam and smear campaign.
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@nerthos Most people don't seem to have the werewithal to oppose these people. They're unpleasant, loud, and obnoxious, and tend to be fed and backed by people with very large bankrolls. There's a complex web to dismantle when it comes to tackling these lot and most people don't have the patience for the amount of work you'd have to put into legitimately eradicating these bad actors.
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@maiyannah Discrete harassment is the solution. Making them feel genuinely terrible until they leave or off themselves.
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